Enda,
Teachers are just another user, so yes, they can. The only forum unique to a teacher is the Teacher forum within a course. Student users cannot see this forum when they are logged in. Teacher forum is a great place to discuss course design, or to collaborate on other issues like student performance etc. When a forum resource is created, you have a number of options to select from as to how it will behave.
The News forum on the site homepage is often set up with "No discussions, no replies," because it is used primarily by the site administrator to make general announcements. Setting this to: "Discussions and replies are allowed" would enable everyone (teachers and students) to post to this forum. One option you might want to explore when setting up a forum resource is the "Use ratings:" feature. This feature allows you to do many interesting things with Forums, including creating custom Scales that relate more to say subject matter. Review posts in the Forum module area at Moodle.org to learn about all the interesting ways that you can use this great feature.
Hope this helps,
Bryan
Thanks for your detailed reply Bryan, what I'm trying to do is add a news forum to my site homepage which can be written to by the admin and teachers but not students.
That is exactly how the news forum on our site homepage works: teachers can post and students can only read. It is set up as "No discussions, no replies" and its type is "News forum". Is yours different? You as administrator can log in as a teacher or as a student and check out what they see.
Gustav,
Could you elaborate on how to set up the News forum on the site homepage where teachers, who do not have admin permissions, can post something when the aforementioned settings are (No discussion, no replies) set by the admin. Thanks!
Bryan
Gustav,
That's how I set up mine but teachers cannot post, unless I make them admins which I don't want to do....
I thought this was a standard feature of Moodle but apparently it isn't. When posting my previous post I had forgotten that long time ago I registered all our teachers also as teachers for course 1 (the Moodle home page is treated like another course with id = 1). That is the reason why they can post to the course news forum.
In order to add teachers to course 1 you can use a little trick. Go to any of your courses and click on "Teachers...." in the admin box. This brings you to the page where you can add teachers to that particular course. You then have to manually edit the URL so that it refers to id=1 and reload the page. You can then add teachers to the Moodle front page.
Thanks Gustav,
I'll give that a try
Enda
Gustav,
This should be added to the Tips and Tricks forum. Thanks for the insight!
Bryan